A startup is suing Facebook, Princeton for stealing its AI data

A Lithuanian company called Planner 5D is suing both Facebook and Princeton University for stealing its artificial intelligence training data -- an early skirmish in the strange new legal frontiers of AI. Princeton computer scientists scraped more than 45,000 files from Planner 5D's software, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, and used them to train their artificial intelligence algorithms. They then made that information, which they named the SUNCG dataset, available to other computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers, the legal document claims. Through partnerships with Princeton, the data made its way into the hands of Facebook scientists, who used it to develop the company's AI -- and the lawsuit also suggests that the data could have benefitted Facebook's virtual reality company, Oculus. Facebook made the dataset, full of original and lightly-modified Planner 5D files, available as a resource to contestants in the 2019 Scene Understanding and Modeling challenge for computer vision researchers, who are competing for a cash prize and a speaking slot at a conference later this month.